I used to edit Innovation Management. My book, "The Elastic Enterprise", co-authored with Nick Vitalari and described as a must read for companies that want to succeed in the new era of business - looks at how stellar companies have gone beyond innovation to a new form of wealth creation. I speak on new innovation paradigms.
I started my writing career in broadcasting and then got involved in the EU's attempt to create an ARPA-type unit, where I managed downstream satellite application pilots, at just the time commercial satellite services entered the market. I also wrote policy, pre the Web, on broadband applications, 3G (before it was invented), and Wired Cities.
I have written for many major outlets like the Wall St Journal, Times, HBR, and GigaOm, as well as producing TV for the BBC, Channel 4 and RTE. I am a research fellow at the Center For Digital Transformation at UC Irvine, where I am also an advisory board member, advisory board member at Crowdsourcing.org and Fellow of the Society for New Communications Research.
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How ludicrous is this? Apple is a top performing company with plenty of room to grow. In the mobile space it is normal to count sales in the hundreds of millions. In computing you are big at 30 million units. Contrast with Nokia. At its peak, the Finnish company sold around 450 million phones a year. Mobile represents scale beyond the dreams of computer makers.

Apple is in a fairly new place with sentiment – performing extremely well but getting nailed by opinion. It’s not entirely new. Apple competitor Nokia lost its shine before it lost its competitiveness, taking criticism for its design shortcomings while it was a global powerhouse.

Nokia was poor enough at managing perceptions about its performance that senior management lost the right to manage. And that view is forming around Tim Cook, rightly or wrongly.

“….automated sentiment analysis is viable commercially ONLY because of high frequency trading applications. Algorithmic trading is an anomaly in that it creates a feedback loop – it almost doesn’t matter about the accuracy of the signal, as long as there is a definite pos or neg signal the signal drives the trades, the trades drive further moves in the same direction in terms of investor sentiment and the value lies in latency, who can act first to exploit the opportunity creates, so that’s why sentiment analysis is a market at all.”

In other words Apple’s problems lie in the signals swirling around the market place, all quite detached from its PR machine that largely emerge from social media sources like blogs. We need to know more about the impact of online sentiments. They are clearly taking a toll on Apple right now. Just as clearly we have a misplaced emphasis on social media as a marketing tool when in fact its real impact might be on valuations.

The right way to deal with it – Cook has to up his game and become more of a peer in the community of people building their businesses around Apple.

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Apple is bleeding their old supporters with their mobile trajectory, which I can’t blame them for doing, but as a long term MacPro Book user I found that when the cancelled the 17″ MBP my support for Apple diminished drastically. They are basically saying they don’t want the old guard around that helped them build Apple to where it is today.

88 percent of the apps in Apples app store have never been downloaded. Having a million apps in your app store is not an advantage like Forbes and every other tech/business site would have you believe. I don’t know anyone who has 250K apps on their phone. After installing 10-50 main apps that every ecostem has everything else is overkill and fart apps.

For years, Microsoft bragged about it’s Windows ecosystem and how many applications they had made them so much better than anything Apple had to offer. Nobody said a word about application overkill. They all just agreed with Microsoft. Of course, now with the ball in Apple’s court, the high number of apps means absolutely nothing. I love the way the iHaters flip-flop like a dying fish. Whether the high number of apps means anything or not as far as OS supremacy goes, they’re there for whomever wants to download them.

The missing factor in all this future apple speculation is the axiom “once you go mac – you don’t go back.” People love their apple products. And those apple lovers tend to have more money than the people who buy something else. This isn’t speculation. This is reality.

So setting aside all the predictions of how other platforms are going to eat into the apple pie lies the fact that Apple is going to continue to make boatloads of cash as apple owners upgrade to future versions of the iphone and ipad.

With all respect, I have no idea what this article is saying. The last sentence is indicative of the impenetrability of the rest of the piece: “The right way to deal with it – Cook has to up his game and become more of a peer in the community of people building their businesses around Apple.” What on earth does that mean?

It’s saying that online sentiment is affecting the share price and Apple has lost control of that sentiment. A lot of people build businesses around Apple – like developers. They thought of Jobs as a peer with a bit more insight. I am not sure they relate to Cook at all.